#i am not a sprite artist i just like using pixel lines sometimes

[mirrorteru]

Sol.... and her core

[jacscorner]

Pokemon All-Stars: A Fan Region/Game/Alternate Universe Idea

I like watching and rewatching Original Pokemon Game/Region videos. Like Mr. Buddy's "What if X was a Pokemon Region" and stuff like that. I wanna make-or, I guess, write-my own. Since Regions are kind of a character all their own and I'm a Wannabe Character Artist, I wanted to try and make one my own.

I've got no skills in coding, pixel arts, or anything, so this will forever be just some kind of dumb fanfic that sometimes incorporates Game Mechanics to justify things if it were able, for some Godforsaken reason, 'stolen' for a game. Cause, in 2021, no idea feels too big or too dumb. And, uh, trust me, this'll be a dumb fanfic of an idea. So be aware for the subpar writing talents of some wannabe writer who doesn't know shit.

Small disclaimer though:

>This region is being made with the intention that every extra feature will be available in it. Z-Moves, Regional Variants, Gygantamax, Mega Evolutions, and maybe some things I've forgotten. This probably won't matter cause it's just a dumb fanfic plot bible with mechanics peppered in. Competitive balancing be damn! Pokemon Fans can create their own balance! That's what the Battle Simulator is for! In fact, if this was a real game, then it'd have a Battle Simulator like Showdown built into it.

>This is an open source Fanfic Bible. You can take this idea and run with it if you want. You can omit all my bad ideas even!

>I won't be making my own Fakemon. I don't like a lot of Fakemon that exists out there and, trust me when I say this: I am no better than them. In fact, I'm fucking worse.

>If this WERE a game, it probably WOULD still have to cut some Pokemon. I doubt that kinda, and I won't get into why I think dexit was dumb personally, cause it doesn't really matter. But, like, my fan game/fanfic will have a lot of shit going on in it. So, like, realistically, there would probably need to be a cut, if not for data, than just cause there's a lot of work to do as is. But, like, again, under the context of a fic, this wouldn't be an issue.

>With THAT said, I'd want this game to have a Gen 2 Sprite aesthetic. My fangame, don't care if ya'll don't like that.

>I'm probably gonna copy a LOT of stuff from other Fangames I've played. My shit memory probably won't allow me to remember what I'm biting from what, so be free to call me out whenever. Cause if I stole the mechanic, I probably liked it the game. And if not, well, I'd like the recommendation.

Fuck, this was long already. The rest is under the cut, so, like, if you're already turned off, you can stop reading. I understand. I'm kind of a windbag.

Okay, so how many of you guys have seen this picture on the internet? It's a picture of a ton of Pokemon regions all...basically stitched together, since not only could this never be canon, but this goes beyond the size of even most open world games today. But this was the inspiration for this project. The map probably wouldn't, and probably couldn't, look like this, but it perfectly sums up what I'd want out of this game. Thus, it'll be our placeholder.

Our hometown of Capricorn Town is home to Professor Chestnut, and you, her faithful assistant, are about to set off on a Pokemon adventure of your own! The Professor is encouraging you to see the region of Sidus for yourself and is even willing to give you a Starting Pokemon!

Starting Pokemon

Now, if I'm not making new Pokemon, which Starter will it be? Well, the game will have the data for all the starters and will randomly select a Grass, Fire, and Water Type for you to choose from. Those will be your starters, with the option of also choosing Pikachu, Eevee, and Riolu, the two mascot mons...and Riolu, who is kind of a mascot mon, but a lesser one.

Let's say for this example, your options are Torchic, Piplup, Rowlet, Pikachu, Eevee, and Riolu. And, uh, get used to the words 'random' and 'generator', those are our keywords.

Anyway, once you get your pick, there'll be some kind of tutorial mission the Professor will send you on. This will introduce you to two very important things;

1. One of your Rival.

2. An Evil Team Grunt.

Rivals?!

Now to start getting into why this game might still be pretty big still be big despite the sprites on modern consoles.

Each of your Rivals would be one kid from each region of the 8 Mainline Games from Kanto to Kalos. How this'll be decided is that each pair of kids will be plugging into a generator and will pick between either the boy or girl version.

Ex. Brendan and May both cannot be in the game. Instead, they'll be plugged into this generator. Let's say the generator fell onto May. She'll be one of your Rival. Repeat this process 7 more times until you have 8 Rivals sprinkled throughout the world, each one given a defined personality and better AI to make them harder trainers to fight.

May will have one of the Hoenn Starters, sans Torchic. Regardless of whether or not Protagonist-San picked Torchic, May will either have a Treecko or Mudkip, again, chosen at random per kid. Whichever Starter you picked, your first rival will have a starter that beats yours. So, let's say moving forward, May has a Mudkip and you a Torchic. The other kids will have random starters of the various regions they originally hail from.

Anyway, your rivals will wander the overworld. If they see you, they'll battle you on sight. If they lose, they'll be gone after the next time you turn the game off. They won't battle you again until they respawn, but you can hang out with them. In fact, you can even recruit them to be in your party for a few days and they'll follow you around and just generally be your friend. It'll make every battle a double battle, but they'll battle you again before their timer runs out, so be prepared!

BANG! BANG! ENTER! Team Wild!

The two of you will have to face off against Team Wild! They have a Cowboy theme to them, using a mix of Ground and Steel-Types, with a few Pokemon being added in for good measure like the Ponyta Lines, Cacnea Line, and Remoraid. Cause...it's a gun.

They're an outlaw gang, they're rough and tough (or, at least, a mild threat) and will always throw down when they spot ya. Something I'm just sniping from JelloApocalypse is that they'll appear sporadically and act as Timed Events across the map.

You and your new Rival beat them and send you packing. I'd imagine May and the other Rivals would mostly be friendly, but I'm sure there's one or two that'll just be jerks to you. Regardless of personality, they'll be pretty tough and programmed to skill with you. Your strongest mon you have on hand when you fight them will be the level their entire team.

With your tutorial done, the world is opened up! Your mom gives you your running shoes, some Pokeballs, and your...I don't know, PokeCelular or something, just the regional gadget that does a bunch of stuff. From holding your map to holding your VS Seeker.

The PokeCelular will also give you notifications on where Team Wild are! You can choose to ignore the events, but if you do, then they'll start to appear in the overworld know and will get progressively stronger.

A Balancing Act

This game will be an open world, 8-Bit Sprite Game for you to explore after you leave Capricorn!

So how do we balance that?

Well, we got our Rival out of the way already, so let's move on. Gym Leaders will have a pretty linear progression. However, regardless of which Gym you tackle first, they'll all be at the same level.

It doesn't matter if you decide to go across the map and battle the Bug Gym, he'll stay at Level 10, just like the Normal Gym. Whe you get the second badge, they'll all jump to Level 15. NPC Trainers will follow the same progression; the higher your badge number, the stronger the number of Pokemon they'll be.

Wild Pokemon will also get stronger. The more badges you get, it'll attract stronger wild Pokemon because they'll see you're stronger and will come out more.

The overworld will also have various dungeons in them that'll be Level Locked. Say, you go through a forest and you're just trying to reach the end of a maze. The Trainers and Pokemon will function the same as I've mentioned before. But, you can decide to go deeper into the dungeon. These Pokemon will be level locked, usually something of a high level, because this is a more dangerous part of the dungeon. But, there'll be some goodies down there, like rarer Pokemon and some kind of really rare and good item like a TM or something.

How will you traverse? Well, first of all, HMs? They're semi-back. BUT, instead of having to deal with teaching Cut to a Pokemon, you just need the move Cut and a Pokemon that can use the move and you'll be able to use Cut. A few other Pokemon that are reasonable candidates, but don't get cut, will be allowed to do this too. Like, Gallade can use Cut. It can't learn the move, but just holding the HM will get the job done.

Controversial opinion, but I think I've always liked the idea of HMs. On paper, they give you a reason to explore the world and go back to areas you couldn't before for goodies and make for a good way to get off dungeons until you get the needed item. Even something like Cut can be used to open up new areas for exploration for your squad of mons.

BUT, well, HMs suck. As moves, they suck save for, like, 2...MAYBE and they're only for, like, a handful of areas. You either hand them out as evenly as possible, forcing mons to take moves you don't wanna use, or you just get an HM Slave or two to use 'em all. But like they, they serve their function and all you need is the Pokemon in question and NOT teach them the move. If you need a Move Deleter just so people aren't stuck having to use Rock Smash for three towns, then there's a problem with your RPG. Imagine playing Final Fantasy and you had to give your Fighter the Bronze Axe to get through a forest and still had to fight with it, even though you got a +12 Silver Sword! It's no wonder people hated these things! But I don't think getting rid of them and introducing Rental Pokemon was a good solution either and adds a different, albeit less intrusive problem.

Gym Leaders

So, how do Gym Leaders work?

Much like your rivals, they'll be randomly generated. Let's say, hypothetically, there's a pool of 60 Gym Leaders and Elite Four members. The game will randomly generate 16 to be Gym Leaders. The generator will have some kind of complicated math (at least, too complicated for me) so that you don't have more than 2 gyms of the same type. (Example: Misty and Nessa might be Active Gyms, Siebold can't be selected for a Gym cause the Water Slots are taken).

As a trade off, some Gyms might have special conditions before you can challenge them. Like, if you got stuck with Koga as a Gym Leader, than he'll only let you in if you complete a nearby dungeon and help his daughter out cause he doesn't trust her to make it back on her own. Or, like, Claire's a Gym Leader, but she won't battle you unless you've collected 7 Gym Badges prior at least.

The Gym Leaders, as mentioned before, will get progressively stronger with each badge obtained. After the 8th badge, you can go and climb Victory Road, face the E4 and confront the Champion! You can keep hunting Gym Leaders, but just remember that the E4 will always be 10 Levels above the strongest gym you beat. And they'll just get stronger with every one you beat until all 16 are slain.

Another handful, let's say 8, Gym Leaders/E4 Members will be wondering around as NPC Trainers. The justification is that this big super region is in some Alternate Universe Pokemon Game that has all the Pokemon and other important trainers in it, hence why we can have a game where Roxanne and Lenora are hanging out at a coffee shop. They're not Rivals, more like stronger NPCs you can rematch and wonder the map. They're not here to be the very best like no one ever was.

I mean, I'd like, like, 10-20 instead of 8 extras, but let's not get TOO greedy...yet...

Elite Four

And now, it's time to flip the script. Cause if E4 members can be Gym Leaders, then who are the Elite Four?

Easy. The Rivals.

All the Rival characters will be put in a random generator as well. The four that are chosen. You can have an Elite Four made up of Wally, Marnie, Hau, and Barry and you gotta deal with it.

This is excluding Brendan and May, Blue, and Calem and Serena. Anyone else is fair game.

Champion

So, the Champion. Who would it be in this? There was a funny idea I had, but this is a Pokemon Game. So there would be two versions. We'll call them Pokemon Dawn & Dusk. The difference between these games is the game Champion!

Benga would be the Champion of Pokemon Dusk, the grandson of Alder! His final Team will include Volcarona, Garchomp, and Dragonite, Pokemon he used in Black and White. I'd also include Scrafty, Rampardos, and Golurk, Pokemon used against you in White Treehollow and Black Tower areas.

Meanwhile, the Champion of Pokemon Dusk will be Zinnia, the Lorekeeper! Her team would include the Goodra, Tyrantrum, Altaria, Noivern, and Salamence she used in her original team, with her plucky Whismur sidekick becoming an Exploud and her ace.

You would've met them in the beginning of the game and would've showed off a bit by helping you with Team Wild before. They'll pop in and out throughout the game, at first amused by your tenacity, but not wanting a rookie like you to get hurt. But if you keep bonking Team Wild, they'll be impressed with how strong you are.

The show up to chat again when you beat 8 Gym Leaders, and will pop in if you White Out to give you some advice. White Out three times and they'll feel bad for you and give you an egg. Benga will give you a Larvesta Egg and Zinnia a Bagon Egg.

EXTRAS

So I don't got a lot of ideas for the Post Game, but there is one idea I thought would be cool if, if after you defeat the champion, they give you a call. They'll tell you that there are strong trainers wondering the Overworld and to be careful.

Because dotting the overworld will be Champions passed and proper! Cynthia, Blue, Lance; all of them are rocking Lv 100 Teams and are out for blood. They won't challenge you, but if you talk to them, there will be no backing out of the battle! You come with your A-Game!

sI'm not exactly in love with the idea of Team Wild. Maybe the Evil Team should go full fanservice and just be Team Rainbow Rocket. Or maybe go half-and-half; having past Evil Team members and leaders walk around in cowboy gear and acting as Team Wild executives.

I'd also would love Tournaments. Like, maybe that could be a weekly event in some town, they'll how tournaments and the characters that aren't designated as Gym Leaders and such will attend. Maybe there's a cash prize, maybe you'll win Pokemon Eggs of rare, guaranteed shines, or maybe you'll get some kind of important quest items.

Yeah, I want quests! All sorts of side quests! And can't forget what I'd do with Legendairs;

If you know Bengal's team, you'll know he's got the Lati Twins. I don't like that personally and would prefer Legendaries to be Super Bosses. Like, you gotta do a lot to find them. And when you do, their stats are boosted and they become an Uber Boss! You catch them in a cutscene after you beat them!

There's also just a ton of characters I didn't get around to or really have a place for. Emma, Looker, N, and the Stat Trainers all come to mind. Overall, I'd want them to pepper the world as well, but don't have anything to say except this: Pokemon has made a lot of memorable characters. Both good and bad. And this is probably my dream Pokemon Game; one where you can hang out with your favorites

[blobsreviewsofgame]

Sonic 25th Anniversary Artbook by Cook & Becker

I think I should've wrote this maybe sooner but... the Sonic artbook by Cook & Becker simply sucks compared to stuff like the Japanese Splatoon artbook or the Mega Man Complete Works. And I love Sonic more than both of these franchises. So let me list the things about this book that really, really bothered me.

The size

I hate this size. It’s 32 H x 28 W cm. Who'd want to use this? It's heavy too; 2.2kg/4lb. Most shelves aren't even this tall. It can't fit in! I have it constantly laying there on my table, collecting dust. Why couldn't be the size of a book like the Japanese Splatoon one or the Mega Man Complete Works artbook. Coffeetable size is horrible.

Reference images

That's something a bit odd but I really would've loved to see. There's some reference art for the classic renditions of the characters... but the Adventure-style has no reference images (the reference image it does have is a Sonic X one). And I really hate that because there are some reference sketches floating online but all the Japanese notes are untranslated and it would've really helped me at figuring out how the heck I can draw these renditions.

Too much text, it's not a documentary, idiots.

Cook & Becker, hear me out. No one gives a crap about the history of a video game franchise in an artbook. Unless you got together the artists of these images and interviewed them to get some kind of information about the art, cut the text out. You're wasting ink and the writer's time here. People who bought an art book about the video game franchise they love, don't need to hear about what a particular title is about. Or what a fucking ring is. We already know that if we're such nerds to buy a damn artbook about it.

Take some notes from the Mega Man Complete Works artbook. That one does have some text but it’s actually kinda needed sometimes. It explains the game in a couple of short sentences and then quickly goes onto what the artists have to say about some of the art they made.

The layout

I hate this layout. Sometimes, they made the art often span across 2 pages which might sound cool for one second until you realize that you can't see the flipping middle of the art! Yeah! Great! Who cares about looking at the art without troubles? Making the user have a hardtime seeing the art is way better than looking at it without problems on one page! And sometimes they just decide to overlay one image on top of another so all that time finding the rare art was for nothing because some moron thought that this layout was a great idea.

Sometimes they go with a chronological character art layout, then they'll switch to art from games. Have some consistency here! Oh, what am I talking about? This is something Sonic related from 2016, it won't have consistency. Even if it's an artbook!

Wrong facts

Sonic 3D Japanese art dates

Hey, guys, you goofed up. Knuckles' page lists dates and the Japanese Sonic 3D art says "1996". Yet the Tails one says "1997". And both are wrong. Sonic 3D released 1999 in Japan. That's why they have their Adventure artstyle here. You could've looked this up in 20 seconds by googling "Sonic 3d release dates".

Sonic X being on the same page as Adventure Sonic

They accidently put Sonic X-Sonic on the same page as Adventure Sonic art.

Stuff missing (X-Treme? Saturn?)

The book mentions the cancelled game title "Sonic X-Treme", yet it never shows art from it. I don't get why, it's not like there's no concept art from other cancelled games in there, like Crackers. And why isn't there much Saturn era stuff? I know that Sonic didn't have many games during that but there's a lot of stuff missing. Like the Sonic Jam pre-rendered models or the wallpaper art. Heck, throw in some Sonic the Screensaver concept art too. It's like they gave up at archiving the art one third-way through.

Other missing stuff

Chao concept art

During the unveiling of Sonic Adventure, there was concept art of the Chao shown. Why is the only thing on there 3 very common Chao artworks?

Sonic Adventure art in general Yo, Sonic Retro has a ton of Adventure art archived. Why don't you guys put that in the book? Or that weird looking Sonic art from the front of Sonic.

Sure, it looks kinda bad but it's very rare. Something that you guys said was that you were looking for a lot of rare images to archive in that book. I only see a couple of them here. Most of the time, it's either stuff I've seen 100 times before or something rather recently discovered.

Environmental concept art I would've loved to see more concept art for Sonic's levels. Things that happen in the level, what the level looked like, level design sketches... That should've been in the book.

Rare art I'll just put a ton of low quality images on there that are pretty much either lost, uncommon or rare which you guys could've put in the book. For shame, for shame! https://imgur.com/a/IDc3r

"What the actual shit"-part

This is the part where I can just go "What were they thinking?!". I can't find a reason why they did this and it makes no sense why they did it.

Pages that fold out which are just screenshots of the fucking games

Do I have to point that out why this is such a bad idea to begin with? If I want to look at the game, I'll play the actual game. And why do these pages fold out? None of the other pages do this, heck, the art that spans across pages would've needed that instead of these images.

Anyways...

Transparent pages that don't line up with the art on the other page

Just look. This is a transparent page... where you can look through it to view another page... And it doesn't line up or has anything identical in the slightest. So... why make it transparent?

Sonic 2's Japanese box art

You photoshopped American Sonic and Tails on top of the Japanese Sonic 2 boxart. That's disgusting, you know that?

Pages that show sprites Look. Pixel art is still art. I get that, it takes time to put something complicated in a restricting format. But... you can look up sprite sheets online and you'd get the same expierence as looking at this book. I bought this book to look at rare or even unpublished art of Sonic. Some may have bought it to see high quality images of Sonic's art. I doubt that anyone bought this to look at pixel art because you can look at that online for free. Wasting pages with something that you can look up online for free in 20 seconds is not a good thing in your artbook to have.

Even Mega Man Complete Works artbook has 0 pixel art. The franchise known for being in the 8-bit pixel form for 8 out of 11 games.

A page about the ring

This page is pure filler. How did they get away with this? Someone at SEGA and at Cook & Becker had to look at this and think "This is great. Ship it.". I now should either have no faith in SEGA in Quality Assurance checking now or won't trust Cook & Becker as a company ever. Maybe both.

With that said, I wouldn’t ever recommend this book to anyone. This artbook is the Sonic Forces of artbooks. I bet if a lot of fans would come together and find and scan all the Sonic art they could find, they’d make a much better artbook than this atrocity. So get the Kirby artbook instead, I guess? Ugh...

[godslush]

Oh, and because apparently nobody wanted to know anything from that artist ask post, here’s all the answers anyway:

   Do you prefer traditional drawing, or digital? I actually feel a lot more comfortable with sketching and lines in traditional, but I've been spoiled by digital tools for coloring and refining. I'd say digital for now since I don't have a good means to do traditional lines and then transfer them to PC for coloring; no room for a scanner and too lazy to clean up a photo.    How long have you been drawing? Technically since pre-school, but I started drawing seriously with intent to improve in 6th grade, which was 1997-1998, so about 20 years. :>    How many classes have you taken? I took technically four years in high school, but the teacher didn't so much teach drawing techniques as she did nurture students' existing abilities and provide challenges, usually in the form of prompts and different mediums. I also took one summer in college that was an introductory course that didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know, I just had to take it as compulsory 'diversification' (since I was majoring in biology). It probably helped a lot, though, in the sense that it forced a lot of still life drawing, something that's of great value to all artists that I tend to shun because it's 'boring' and such, which is a very bad mentality to have, haha.    Do you have a DeviantArt, personal website, or art blog? I have a DevArt (Daimera) but it's defunct and I will never update it again. It's a good way to see how I've grown, though, since it goes back pretty far and I haven't deleted much, only hidden a bunch of my original character art due to annoying children and art thieves. My dedicated art blog now is artslush here on Tumblr.    What’s your favorite thing to draw? Whatever I'm having fun with at the time! Usually monsters, but not always!    What’s your least favorite thing to draw? Realistic people. Realistic anything. Seriously, just take a photo.    How often do you use references? Much less than I probably should.    Do you draw professionally, or just for fun? Just for fun. Not sure if I'd enjoy drawing professionally; if it becomes my job I fear I may grow to resent one of my only forms of enjoyment.    How much time do you spend drawing on an average day? Not nearly long enough.    Are you confident about your art? I'm sort of see-sawing. I'm happy with my art from my own perspectives and relative to where I'd like to be, but I know I'm nowhere near good compared to actual professionals. I just try not to let it bother me.    How many art-related blogs do you follow? Considering I came to Tumblr because of art blogs (or blogs of people who do art on occasion even if it's not their main theme), do you really want me to go and manually count them? ... Really...? Ugh, okay... ... ... ...62. ...What? I like to keep a clean dashboard!    Is it okay for people to ask you about your process? It is but you're not gonna get a particularly great answer! I have some videos up on YouTube, mostly long streams though.    Do you prefer to keep your art personal, or do you like drawing things for other people? Mostly personal now. I used to draw way more for others in the past, but when I started attracting the attention of a younger and more entitled crowd (not gonna say who but if you've been there you know), I've become more and more reclusive out of the desire to just not have to deal with the drama of kids trying to guilt me into doing free art for them. "I love your work! See, I've complimented you! You owe me now! You've done free art for others, so why not meee???! Wow, you're such a horrible person! I'm going to treat you like garbage and tell everyone what an awful person you are for not giving me free stuff or reciprocating my 'kindness' to you!!" Maybe I'm overreacting or projecting, but it's something I just want to avoid, even if it's not likely to happen. I just can't deal with that kind of trash.    Do you ever collaborate with others? I think I've only done a small handful of collabs, and even then, it was more "someone did a black and white pic for me for reason A or B and I decided to color it", or someone seeing lineart I’ve done and going “Hey, that’ s awesome! Can I color it? :D”  I don’t think I’ve ever been in on a project that was a collab from the get-go.    How long does an average piece take you to complete? Depends on the complexity, I'm fairly impatient so I prefer to take as little time as possible, preferably in one sitting split up by short breaks. I'd say 3-6 hours? I get VERY disheartened if I spend a lot of time on something only for it to not get attention proportionate to the effort I'd put in.    Do you draw more today than you did in the past, or do you draw less? Less, unfortunately. I was a lot more confident and dedicated back in the day until art students I'd surrounded myself with destroyed my drive with their self-destructive attitudes. I felt very "Well, they're way better than I will ever be and they think their work is garbage, what hope do I have of ever being anything more than what amounts to worse than garbage?"  I don't feel that way now, but I was never able to pick my momentum back up fully after hitting that wall.    Do you think you’re justified in giving other people art advice? No, but I often find myself being asked for it anyway, haha.    What are you currently trying to improve on? Nothing specifically, though I'm trying to make single character pieces slightly more dynamic than "character standing there in default idle pose." I'm not fully successful, but baby steps.    What is the most difficult thing for you to draw? Backgrounds and sensible lightsourcing.    What is the easiest thing for you to draw? Nonsensical eldritch monsters.    Do you like to challenge yourself? Not really. I'm very much a comfort zone person.    Are you confident that you’re improving steadily? Yep! It's a very slow steadily though, haha.    Do you draw more fanart, or more original art? Lately it's been more fanart; it gets more attention more quickly, and I find it more satisfying to draw something when I know more people like it. It's a double-edged sword, though; if people are clearly liking the content simply for being that content rather than for being my art of that content, I start feeling bitter. See: me any time half-assed Pokemon fanart of mine that I don't even think is all that good gets stupidly popular.    Do you feel jealous when you see other people’s art, or inspired? (Be honest!) I used to, and on occasion I will on certain very specific kinds of designs (usually mechanical and cybernetic), but for the most part it's counter-productive to hold a bar high with the work of others and expect to achieve that. All it does is lead to despair.    Do you like to draw in silence, or with music? MUSIC. I have a lot of playlists, and they're usually game-based.    For digital artists: what program(s) do you use? I used to use OpenCanvas predominantly, but now I use Manga Studio. I'll occasionally touch up in an ancient copy of Photoshop 7. I occasionally dabble in Krita, especially if I want live symmetry. For sprites, I usually use Photoshop for the initial, and ImageReady to animate, but lately I've been trying to switch over to PyxelEdit. If I want to do animating that's not pixels, I use Pencil2D, but you'll almost never get to see my failures there, hahaha.    For digital artists: how many layers does a typical piece require? Back when I was using OpenCanvas, which only had 'transparent' layer styles (Add, Multiply, Subtract), I'd usually have very few, and a lot of those habits held. Often times my layer flow looks like: - Lines - Highlight details - Broad highlight - Shadows - Color - Sketch And sometimes I'll just add one or two additional glowy or shadow detail layers to that. This is usually per-character, so multi-character pics will double what's there for the most part. If there's a background, though, expect like five thousand layers, lol.    What inspires you to not just make art, but to be a better artist? My head is filled with a lot of crap, and I just want other people to kind of share in that. Since I'm not great with words on a descriptive level, drawing the things I see in my mind is the next best thing to magically gaining the ability to transmit my thoughts and mental images to others, lol. The better I am, the better I can get those ideas across.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Despite being a fairly mediocre artist, I get a lot of comments and compliments on the artwork and visual design in Ikenfell. This makes me very happy, of course. Obviously, those who dislike it are much less likely to say so to me personally, but I love that lots of people are very receptive to the look and style of the game. I’ve been asked several times to talk about my approach to the pixel art, and what kinds of rules, palettes, and inspirations I use for the game. So this will be a large, orderless, and rambling post about all of that!

About Ikenfell

Perspective

Inspiration

Colours

Process

Characters

Portraits & Dialogue

Battles

Ikenfell is a heartwarming turn-based RPG about a school of magic and its troublesome students. It is currently in active development, and we're aiming for a 2018 release on Steam and the Humble Store. Humble Bundle Inc. is publishing the game.

Official Website / Official Press Kit

If you write about the game in a blog or article, please use assets from the official press kit!

A note about "good" pixel art

As with most art styles, there is a lot of contention about what good pixel art is and what best practices should be. I follow some general guidelines, but most of what I do is from just repeatedly doing lots of pixel art and tweaking my style until I get the results I desire. A lot of amazing pixel artists produce work that is far beyond my capabilities, but I do the best I can within my limits.

This overview is not about how to make good or popular pixel art, it is about my design decisions regarding my own game, my inspiration, and my reasoning behind them.

Now, let’s begin!

Ikenfell’s camera, like a lot of 2D games (especially RPGs), has a birds-eye view of the game world.

The camera is looking down at the world, if you imagined it in 3D, at about ~60 degrees (this is a rough estimate, in this screenshot alone you can see I am very liberal with the actual angle of objects). The projection is orthographic, meaning that as objects get further away from the camera, they do not actually look smaller (as in real life), they are “flattened” onto the screen.

Often game developers will just make 2D games and take all this for granted, and just draw the art, but I like to think about camera and perspective a lot, as it’s one of the key relationships in the game between the player and the world itself. Knowing the details of this relationship can make the difference sometime when you’re making a visual design decision, as even technical details can help you highlight where and when it’s most important to break these rules.

Ikenfell’s visual design is inspired by several games. I found a screenshot from each game that was relatively similar to the Ikenfell screenshot I posted above, so you can easily see where I drew ideas from each!

Link's Awakening

I love Link's Awakening’s extremely reserved use of tiles, and efficiency with space. Every room has an interesting shape, the background tiles use a very minimal amount of antialiasing to occasionally introduce interesting shapes and curves, and rooms are often reduced to their very basic ideas. But you don’t want multiple rooms to feel the exact same, and Link’s Awakening does this wonderfully. Here’s a simple 4-screen graveyard in the game:

This simple area is wonderful. You get an off-purple colour and haunted trees to give you a sense of unease (ghosts will pop out of graves and attack you, but the visuals make you ready for it). The little rubble tiles and weedy overgrowth convey that this is an old, run-down graveyard, not well-kept. The cliff in the bottom screens gives you a sense of location (the graveyard is on a raised-up plateau, giving some sense of the burial rites of whoever owned these graves). The exits to the left and top have different terrain types, indicating that this graveyard is a bridge from one area to another, so we know we’re leaving our previous location. And, finally, despite the 4-rooms containing all the same elements, they are each differently shaped and detailed. You have multiple paths to walk through each room, so there is no correct path, just a strange haunting area to navigate through (while avoiding mean ghosts).

I could talk this much about every single screen in Link’s Awakening, so I’ll stop now, but this kind of overthinking is what drives a lot of Ikenfell’s inspiration. What a gorgeous game.

Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire

While I am not particularly fond of the character designs (or the pixel art in general) of Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire, I do like their buildings and interiors a lot, so they served as inspiration for a lot of Ikenfell’s architecture.

I like how, to create the least amount of view-obstructing details, these games often just eliminate the side and bottom walls of interiors. In this screenshot, there’s some subtle shadows on the side to give a sense of the ceiling’s height, and the bare minimum amount of details scattered about to give a sense of this character’s lifestyle:

Interiors were often cramped, but so many buildings in this game have completely unique artwork, which was very inspiring. When a building or a house looked completely different from others, I was always inspired to search it, and it was always pleasing to explore its interior with its wonderful new details. This bike shop, with its tiled floor, yellow/orange highlights, thin interior walls, and details scattered about was such a cool looking little area:

This game inspired me to research dozens and dozens of building styles and designs, and always to try to make new houses, buildings, and interiors look and feel distinct.

Mother 3

The simple lines, bold flat blocks of color, and almost childish flat look of Mother 3 wonderfully disguises its immense cleverness and wonderful use of space. I thought this game was a huge step-up visually from Earthbound, and if, after playing, you go back and just look at a few rooms, you start to see how nicely arranged a lot of them truly are.

Just like in the above screenshot, this screenshot below shows another night-time scene. Rather than use a real lighting system (difficult on a small system like the GBA), the game uses beautiful blue/purple palettes for dark areas.

The game just has this wonderful way of breaking up monotony as well. In the next screenshot, it’s a simple room with a stairway leading up to a door. But the building is run-down, so they create little 3D indents in the walls, break off pieces of the siding, carpet the stairs, stain the walls, and just create a series of interesting edges that turn a room that would look very boring into a very visually appealing place to walk through. All you have to do here is hold right, but somehow it feels like so much more, this place has a history and you can feel it down to its very skeleton.

The dark outlines around characters and objects in Ikenfell is very inspired by Mother 3, as well as the bold colours and inner-edge lighting. If you look at this side-by-side comparison (Mother 3 on the left, Ikenfell on the right), you can see how solid objects have dark outlines at their edges, but edges inside the sprite use a highlight colour instead, rather than another dark line cutting across them.

I really like how minimal this is, makes objects seem whole, and gives a strong sense of shape and body to things without cluttering them up with detail. If all the edges of an object use dark line, even in their interior, they tend to look really messy and ugly when done at such a low resolution.

Minish Cap

This game is so utterly gorgeous, I wish I could do it any justice by saying I’m very inspired by its visuals, but I can’t really. I often look at dungeons, buildings, forests, and mountains of this game when creating artwork for Ikenfell, but rarely can I even come close to making it look even remotely as good.

When colouring, I like to look at this game, because it does a wonderful job of ramps. The way these trees darken closer to their base is just beautiful, and the little way so much detail is suggested rather than shown is expertly done. Notice how the grass is mostly flat, but there are just a few tufts here and there?

Minish Cap, like Mother 3, also makes tremendous use of huge bodies of flat colour. Detail is often suggested with little bits, like the clouds in the screenshot above. It also serves a helpful gameplay purpose: very often, flat coloured areas are places you can walk, and highly textured objects and tiles are solid. I take great inspiration from this when pixelling Ikenfell's scenery.

Ikenfell actually does the inverse of this. Often, floors and the ground are textured, but objects like furniture and walls are flat, so they look like big obstructing blocks of colour, and you know you cannot pass them. If we highlight all the large flat blocks of colour in this room, we can see a very clear shape, making the room very easy to read, despite being cluttered with a lot of details and characters.

So while I take a lot of inspiration from the games above, and it is very clear how they inspired me, I quite often will deviate from their rules where I feel it works best for my game. By doing so, I have a huge amount of other screenshots and locations from those games I can look at for reference, but I’ve managed to give the game its own unique look and feel, despite having very strong influences.

I find colouring very difficult, and it often takes me a ton of experimentation to end up with something I’m happy with. In Ikenfell, lots of the areas will still probably be changed and re-coloured a lot before the game is done, but I still have a few patterns I find myself repeating.

Most areas of Ikenfell can be divided into two colour groups: a base and a highlight. There is usually one or two base colors, and one or two highlights. Here are a few screenshots and their respective main colour pairings:

Here’s an image that shows my general process when creating environment tiles for a new area. I usually pixel a room, and then break it up into tiles after I know what I want it to look like. Then I can use those tiles to piece together new rooms.

Here is an animated version of that same image, so you can see how each step improves the look:

This example environment doesn’t really have much colour. Sometimes I colour it right away, other times I’ll just work with values (like the above example) and then colour it after. It depends how I’m feeling, and how complex the tiles are.

Since the entire game occurs in a single place, the titular school of magic itself, it’s quite a contained story. This makes character design really fun, because I don’t have sprawling cities or huge towns to worry about. There are probably only about 30–40 characters in Ikenfell, and each has a unique design. There is no character template I use, I pixel each one from scratch, and usually have a couple others next to it for reference so I can make sure it fits in the game.

Here you can see twelve of the game’s characters and their respective silhouettes. The legs are the only thing that they really all have in common, and looks kinda templated. If I was able to start the game from scratch again, I think I would like to play around with size more (make kids shorter, have fatter characters be fatter, and taller characters be taller, muscular/etc.) With so few characters, though, they’re all very identifiable, so I’m pretty happy with them like this.

Not much else to say here. You’ll notice that most characters also follow a two/three-colour scheme. The choice to leave out eyes was because their sprites are too small: eyes ended up just looking the same on all characters (which I didn’t like), or they were comically large. Since the game has portraits during conversations, I felt like it was more important to emphasize their faces and expressions there.

Speaking of which…

For a good several months of development, Ikenfell actually didn’t have portraits for dialogue. The sprites would just move around and have conversations, and that was it. I didn’t have confidence to draw large character portraits (I am terrible at drawing humans and anatomy), and I already felt like the game was becoming too large for me to handle.

But, on a whim one day, I drew little portraits for each of the main characters in my notepad, with a pencil. I loved how these little drawings looked, so I drew them again with a few expressions, and I couldn’t unsee them. I decided that it’d be a lot easier to pixel them if I drew them in pencil first, then translated that to pixel art, which is how I’ve done most of the character portraits now.

Here are a few and their respective silhouettes. Notice that every single character is asymmetrical. I learned early on that if a character’s left/right side is a mirror-image, they look really creepy and strange. This is probably normal art school stuff, but I learned it the hard way.

I’m very happy I did this. I think the characters come alive so much more when you see them talking and expressing themselves like this, and now I can’t even imagine the game without it.

Here you can see how they look in action. The portrait and the textbox slide in, but there is no text immediately. Your eye goes to their face, so you first see their expression. Then the text prints out, and your eye naturally moves to follow it. I pushed the face down into the textbox, instead of on top of it, to reduce how much screen space the dialogue took up as much as possible.

Characters can only speak in short sentences this way, longer sentences being broken into multiple chunks, but this allows me to shift between micro-expressions while they talk. Here you can see Maritte’s anger transition into more of a general frustration, which is a lot easier to notice than if it only had the text.

When I originally was working on the game, it was actually an action RPG, more like Link’s Awakening. It was quite a few months into development before I had some issues with this, and transitioned the game into a turn-based tactical RPG instead.

The reason for this was that I didn’t like how, because the gameplay took place in the school itself, all the rooms had to be designed for fighting and maximum movement. Interesting room shapes and cramped spaces suddenly weren’t viable when I wanted them to be, because real-time fighting wasn’t very fun or interesting in those kinds of rooms.

So I moved battles into a completely separate screen, which allows me to design them however I want, while also designing the overworld to be whatever shape I want as well. The battles are much different than the overworld. Suddenly the graphics are huge and details, and the characters are much more animated and alive!

These battles are 12 x 3 tiles, so they are much more horizontal than vertical. Because of this, characters can also only face left and right. This means I can flip animations, greatly reducing my workload. You’ll also notice that the battlefield is skewed as well, but why?

If we remove the skew, it becomes readily apparent:

Without the skew, we have a problem with occlusion: characters on a tile immediately above another character are almost completely covered if the sprite is large. As soon as we skew the battlefield, though…

We no longer have this problem, since characters can only ever be vertically aligned if they are two tiles apart, and most sprites aren’t tall enough for that to be an issue. I also think it simply makes battles look more dynamic and exciting anyway.

I hope you enjoyed reading this! There’s a lot more to talk about, but this is a simple overview to explain a lot of my graphical choices while designing the game. I might do some smaller posts talking a bit more about the technical details of how I approach the pixel art, but this was a good introduction.

I can’t wait until you can all play this game! I’m having so much fun working on it, I hope you enjoy it when it is released. Please email me if you have questions about anything, my inbox is always open.

@ChevyRay / happytrash@gmail.com

Artwork by Darcy Dee